Multipirate: Naval FPS Blackwake

Oh no. Readers, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know about it, I swear, but that’s hardly a defence is it? Give me a taste of the bosun’s rope-end, if you insist. Lock me in the guard room till I get sober, it’s only fair, or put me in the bilge and make me drink it. If you heave me by the leg in a runnin’ bowline, I’ll understand. It’s all warranted. I’ve been at RPS for seven months and am only now posting about Blackwake: Dead Marque, a multiplayer naval FPS about broadsiding and boarding with destructible ships. I know! Come look, then we can decide what to do with this drunken sailor.

The grand dream is large-scale naval warfare where each player holds a role on the crew, from navigating to manning guns. Ships are destructible and sinkable, cannons blowing great holes in them, but boarding with guns and cutlasses is also a murder option. Along with plain old team deathmatch, the two-man dev team (!) are planning objective scenarios like trying to capture bounty targets or plundering merchant vessels. It’s the sort of ambitious idea that I imagine will come out a bit wonky, but hope the ambition will shine through.

Pre-alpha tests have shown it’ll work with around 120 players, and the developers hope to hit 300 by launch. That’s broadly planned for “mid 2015”. Here, point your one remaining eye at this early footage from last week, bearing in mind it’s still pre-alpha: